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In the same way as urban transportation problems pose challenges in ensuring seamless utilization of city resources, lack of a robust and agile city IT infrastructure limits the capabilities of city administrators to leverage the full potential of the various solutions being implemented. Smart city initiatives involve multiple technology providers and system integrators. The IT infrastructure must be able to cater to the demands of all kinds of applications. Some of the challenges that IT administrators face in a smart city implementation include:
Scalability is defined as the ability to seamlessly scale applications from a pilot to city-wide deployments.
Infrastructure solutions that are not scalable would limit the city from realizing the outcomes at the larger scale. Cities usually start implementing newer solutions as pilots catering to a smaller area, however, as these pilots generate outcomes, these solution deployments should be able to be rapidly expanded to cater city-wide. This expansion would result in generating enormous amounts of data and the need for compute capability also increases. The infrastructure supporting these solutions would have to be capable of scaling up vertically and horizontally while maintaining efficiency.
Security is the ability to secure the data at motion and at rest, also ensuring controlled access to data.
In a digital city context, security and privacy are among the most important aspects to consider while designing newer solutions. It is of paramount importance to the city to secure and protect the data related to its citizens. Thus, the infrastructure driving these solutions must have an intrinsic security capability to support various levels of data protection. Support for encryption, secure boot, signed firmware upgrades, audit logging, and alerts are some of the key security features needed at the infrastructure layer.
Data storage and processing involves optimally storing collected data and running efficient analytics on it.
As cities continue to implement newer smart solutions, the amount of data being generated increases enormously. Therefore, it is critical to have a robust and scalable data storage solution that could support multiple types of data that must be processed and stored at varying scale and speed. Many of the digital city solutions would be governed by regulations and policies related to the storage and processing of the data, so it is critical for the data systems to be able to support capabilities like long-term archival, role-based access, geographic distribution, and encryption.
Integration is the ability to integrate multiple solutions to create an end-to-end outcome.
It is common for cities to have several siloed applications deployed independently of each other. This type of infrastructure limits the ability of the city administrators to realize additional value from combining insights from multiple solutions. There are tremendous possibilities in bringing data and insights from multiple solutions together, which opens a whole new dimension of the value of city data. A centralized view of everything happening across the city gives seamless situational awareness and helps prepare city services to be in a better position to respond to incidents happening on the ground. This needs a strong integration capability, both at the application layer and the infrastructure layer. The ability to deploy multiple types of workloads on the same infrastructure makes integration efforts smoother and quicker to achieve.
Dell Technologies helps address each of these challenges through the wide range of infrastructure products in our portfolio, complementing it with predefined reference architectures and lab validated solutions.